19 Comments

Even dutchies don't always know. I had a (dutch) friend the other day who was doing a dutch writing exercise with another person (non-native speaker).
Dutch Friend: "Ja, het is de boek."
I kind of just stare at him. You're serious? It's het boek man. Het boek? That doesn't sound right...sounds stupid. He asks a couple others, ja-ja 't is het boek.

Worrying about de of het isn't a huge deal basically ;)
But yeah if you're unsure you can always use the website each time. Eventually you won't have to for more and more words.

Yes, that works for me too. Kind of raises the question, though, doesn't it: how did you learn that Restaurant, Buch, and Haus were "das" words in German? The answer is that "you just did" (through lots of usage -- and many mistakes on the way!), so in the long run that's precisely what you have to do for Dutch too... :)

As a native German I always think about the German translation (also because many words sound so familiar or are written the same at least), and which article I would choose. Either "de" or "het". However, I do make a lot of mistakes anyway. So even though it definitely helps a little at the beginning, orientating too much on the German way of using the articles might not always be recommendable in the long run. A friend once told me: "Eine neue Sprache zu lernen bedingt in einer anderen Sprache zu denken und nicht nur, diese Sprache zu lernen." (or so), what basically means, you do need to start thinking in a new language instead of "just" learn to speak. I guess that is true. :-) Happy learning :-)